Roy Scheider, a stage actor with a background in the classics who became one of the leading figures in the American film renaissance of the 1970s, died on Sunday afternoon in Little Rock, Ark. He was 75 and lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Mr. Scheider had suffered from multiple myeloma for several years, and died of complications from a staph infection, his wife, Brenda Seimer, said.

Mr. Scheiders rangy figure, gaunt face and emotional openness made him particularly appealing in everyman roles, most famously as the agonized police chief of Jaws,Steven Spielbergs 1975 breakthrough hit, about a New England resort town haunted by the knowledge that a killer shark is preying on the local beaches.

Mr. Scheider conveyed an accelerated metabolism in movies like Klute (1971), his first major film role, in which he played a threatening pimp to Jane Fondas New York call girl; and in William Friedkins French Connection (also 1971), as Buddy Russo, the slightly more restrained partner to Gene Hackmans marauding police detective, Popeye Doyle. That role earned Mr. Scheider the first of two Oscar nominations.

Born in 1932 in Orange, N.J., Mr. Scheider earned his distinctive broken nose in the New Jersey Diamond Gloves Competition. He studied at Rutgers and at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., where he graduated as a history major with the intention of going to law school. He served three years in the United States Air Force, rising to the rank of first lieutenant. When he was discharged, he returned to Franklin and Marshall to star in a production of Richard III.

His professional debut was as Mercutio in a 1961 New York Shakespeare Festival production of Romeo and Juliet. While continuing to work onstage, he made his movie debut in The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964), a low-budget horror film by the prolific schlockmeister Del Tenney. He had to bend his knees to die into a moat full of quicksand up in Connecticut, recalled Ms. Seimer, a documentary filmmaker. He loved to demonstrate that.

Offered a leading role in The Deer Hunter (1979), Mr. Scheider had to turn it down in order to fulfill his contract with Universal for a sequel to Jaws. (The part went to Robert De Niro.)

Jaws 2 failed to recapture the appeal of the first film, but Mr. Scheider bounced back, accepting the principal role in Bob Fosses autobiographical phantasmagoria of 1979, All That Jazz. Equipped with Mr. Fosses Mephistophelean beard and manic drive, Mr. Scheiders character, Joe Gideon, gobbled amphetamines in an attempt to stage a new Broadway show while completing the editing of a film (and pursuing a parade of alluring young women)  a monumental act of self-abuse that leads to open-heart surgery. This won Mr. Scheider an Academy Award nomination in the best actor category. (Dustin Hoffman won that year, for Kramer vs. Kramer.)

Gold Member

yeah "you're gonna need a bigger boat" is number 35 of all time lines. Roy actually went to a local college here called Franklin and Marshal in the early 50's and was in a acting club for a few years there. He had ask his coach in the club if he thought that he could make it in the industry. Then he was being used mostly for comedy routines. But he certainly went with it.